Tag Archives: Geopolitics

This article was first translated at Fort Russ by “Soviet Bear” & subsequently edited by Jouaquin Flores.

In the world there is one major power, a few minor powers, and many passive objects in someone else’s game, with microscopic local interests. They are called “sovereign states” and most of them are represented in the UN. But today such formal “sovereignty” is fictitious and in name only. Sovereignty is a measure of power. No power – no sovereignty. According to American political scientist S. Krasner: “Sovereignty is organized hypocrisy”[1]. This is truth.

Power is distributed hierarchically in the world [2]

At the top of the pyramid of powers is the United States. It is served by a number of influential, sometimes obstinate, but always loyal vassals: the EU, Japan, Turkey, as well as distinctive proxies in the Islamic world: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan.

The next countries in the scale of power are those who are able to effectively compete in some areas with the United States. They belong to the “second world” (not the first, but not the third): this is the BRICS countries and others like them. Brazil (collectively, Latin America), Russia, India, China and South Africa (collectively, TRANS-Saharan Africa in General). Potentially it is possible that this list can include some of the Islamic powers, seeking to be independent from the USA as much as possible.

All of the other countries in the world are irrelevant and only get underfoot, every time adjoining to someone who is stronger in each particular local case. They are the pretext for sorting things out between the powers of the first and second degree, a kind of Gastarbeitern of world politics.

The US: a structure of power of the first degree

Now the most important thing. The structure of the first power (the United States) is: the highest expression of a certain ideological formula — liberalism ( i.e. globalism or the establishment of a global liberal democracy as the most important mission), as well as two means to achieve the ultimate goal — the victory of liberalism on a global scale —

As the refugee crisis in Europe has come to dominate western media headlines, it has predictably given rise to a complex web of theories, analyses, and politically and ideologically charged omissions and distortions. The corporate propagandists of ‘acceptable journalism’ have presented the issue in a purely humanitarian and cultural light, with little to no political context in terms of the refugee influx as the fruit of imperial wars in Africa and Asia.

These bastions of journalistic truth have managed to flush down the memory hole nearly all evidence published in their own pages of the overlapping strategies of regional and international powers that have conspired to wage war in Syria, openly colluded in wars of aggression in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, and prolonged and capitalized from seemingly endless conflicts in Somalia and elsewhere. All of these very conscious decisions by the ruling class and its political establishment in the US-NATO (plus Israel and GCC), have led directly to the “crisis” as it exists today. And yet, if they’re mentioned at all, it is merely in passing bemusement, the way one might refer to a stupid comment made after one too many tequila shots at a margarita happy hour.

The refugee issue then becomes less a product of political conflict, and more a cultural battlefield with trenches dug along racial and ethnic lines: the struggle to maintain European ‘civilization’ against the barbaric hordes of uncivilized brown-skinned invaders arriving as a “swarm,” to borrow the unintentionally honest expression used by British Prime Minister David Cameron to describe the refugees. This is of course the neocolonial, supremacist position espoused most vocally by the far right throughout Europe, from Marine Le Pen and the Front National in France, to Hungary’s conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban whose heavy-handed tactics – building fences, mobilizing troops and the unemployed, convicts, and fascists of various stripes – to block the refugee influx, have been both praised and condemned by various elements in Europe.